AOL Launches BlueString
Nick Gonzalez
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AOL is launching a new collaborative multimedia story telling service called BlueString at TechCrunch 40. The site ,is a Flex application that lets you pull in all your image, video, and audio content from across the web and mix them together into a multimedia slide show presentation. The shows can be embedded, shared, and edited by your friends.
There are dozens of user generated content sites out there for pictures, videos, and music. Running BlueString on top of all these open APIs instead of trying to stay a walled garden on Xdrive was a smart move on AOL’s part. They’ve assured us that they want to maintain an open system, but AOL will certainly benefit from frequent users that will find it easier to store their content on AOL instead of going through third party sites.
AOL will be demoing the product by mixing together some photos and videos of a road trip synced to music. All the content in the show either uploaded directly to the site and served from AOLs Xdrive or pulled from searches on Flickr’s public feed. They plan on incorporating more APIs in the future. Photos can also be auto synced to your account if you download their syncing program. All your saved files are organized in folders, where you can easily drag, drop, and reorder thumbnails of the content in the slide show’s time line. The shows can be synced to music, which fades out while video plays, and supports a few basic transitions between the slides.
When completed, you can share the shows with your friends by emailing them a permalink, embedding it on a site, or giving them write access to add their own content to the show. The site even lets you create a white list of sites your embed can show up on.
September 19th, 2007 at 6:37 am
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